Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle

Ending the Algerian War was the most urgent task facing de Gaulle on becoming president. Having taken the premiership in June 1958, he went to Algeria and ordered all officers to quit the rebellious Committees of Public Safety, which greatly angered the pieds-noirs and their military supporters. On 16 September 1959 he acknowledged the principle of self-determination for Algeria and effectively accepted the National Liberation Front (FLN) as the chosen intermediary for independence negotiations. The referendum of 8 January 1961 approved his course for both France and Algeria, and the pied-noir revolt of 1960 and the April 1961 coup attempt both failed.

On 18 March 1962 the French government and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic concluded the Évian Accords, declaring a ceasefire on 19 March. The accords covered the ceasefire, prisoner releases, and the recognition of Algerian sovereignty and the right to self-determination, but they also guaranteed French interests. French forces were to withdraw over two years, yet France leased the Mers El Kébir naval base for 15 years and kept facilities for underground nuclear testing in the Sahara. French companies received preference in Saharan mining titles and hydrocarbons were purchased in francs, while Algerians could circulate freely to France for work but without political rights equal to French citizens. In that de Gaulle sought industrial and commercial primacy and control over Saharan oil reserves, the settlement was an unequal bargain over the terms of independence. In the French referendum of 8 April 1962 almost 91 percent approved the accords, and after the Algerian referendum of 1 July an overwhelming majority chose independence, with France recognising it on 3 July.

Implementation met resistance on both sides. The far-right OAS opposed the negotiations with bombings and an attempt on de Gaulle's life at Clamart in August 1962. In a few months of 1962 some 900,000 pieds-noirs left Algeria, and after 5 July the exodus accelerated in the wake of French deaths during the Oran massacre. The widespread killing of Muslims who had served as auxiliaries (harkis) with the French Army directly contravened the accords' amnesty provisions. The historian Alistair Horne notes that the wholesale exodus of the million-strong European community made the three-year transition clauses a dead letter, while on the Algerian side a struggle for power developed between the provisional government and Ahmed Ben Bella's Political Bureau. A blanket amnesty covering all crimes committed by the French army during the war was voted only in 1968.

In sum, de Gaulle resolved the contradiction that had destroyed the Fourth Republic by ending the war and recognising colonial independence, but the accords preserved French economic and military privileges, and the violence inflicted on the Algerian population, the mass displacement, and impunity for French army crimes remained unaddressed.